Tracing Lewis and Clark through Montana's State Parks

At
these historic state sites, visitors can see what the expedition members
saw and learn what further adventures awaited them around the bend. By
Ellen Baumler

This story is featured in Montana OutdoorsNovember–December
2003

During the summers of 1805 and 1806, the natural kaleidoscope of what is
today Montana spread its ever-shifting, multi-hued frames before the men
of the Lewis and Clark Expedition. Moving through this region on their route
to and from the Pacific Ocean, the Corps of Discovery came upon vast natural
wonders, reached the source of the Missouri River, and met various tribes
of Indians who contributed to the journey’s success.

Modern-day travelers looking to retrace the explorers’ steps need
venture no further than Montana’s state parks system. There, visitors
can learn from interpretive specialists about the many hardships endured
by the Corps, view river valleys and plains little changed from two centuries
ago, and gain a richer understanding of the expedition’s significance—both
to the nation’s westward expansion and the Indian people who populated
the region for centuries before Lewis and Clark arrived.

G iant Springs Heritage State Park makes an excellent starting point for
a 21st century tour of Lewis and Clark’s travel sites. Here, massive
springs gush forth in a lush, oasis-like setting on the east bank of the
Missouri River, just outside of Great Falls. Within a few miles of the springs
are five waterfalls that delayed the expedition’s journey (forcing
an 18-mile portage) and for years afterwards defined the upstream navigational
endpoint of the Missouri at Fort Benton. Today four of the falls are dammed,
harnessed for hydroelectric power; only Crooked Falls remains similar to
what the men of the expedition saw.

Giant Springs itself is also largely unchanged. Lewis and Clark were the
first to record these freshwater springs, some of world’s largest.
They bubble forth as cold and clear today as they did on June 18, 1805, when
William Clark came upon “…the largest fountain or Spring I ever
Saw,” which “…boils up from under the rocks near the edge
of the river.”

Meriwether Lewis, too, was amazed when he first visited the springs, noting
in the expedition’s journals that “the water of this fountain
is extremely transparent and cold; nor is it impregnated with lime or any
other extraneous matter.”

Giant Springs produces so much water—156 million gallons each day—that
the 58 feet from there to the Missouri is considered a river in itself (the
North Fork Roe River, as it is called, has been recognized in the Guinness
Book of World Records as the shortest river in the world).

“ That abundant output,” says park manager Dan Smith, “is
why it’s not just called Big Springs but Giant Springs.” The
springs are so important and impressive they make up part of the Great Falls
Portage National Historic Landmark.
The aquamarine waters that today enthrall visitors at the park could have
been rain that fell when the Corps of Discovery passed through. Carbon dating,
according to some experts, suggests that the spring water has been underground
for 3,000 years before it emerges again to the light. Others scientists more
cautiously say it takes just a century
for the water to filter through underground fissures 600 feet deep in Madison
limestone before reaching the surface.
The 830-acre Giant Springs State Park is home to mule deer, foxes, and coyotes,
and it’s a bird watcher’s paradise besides. In what is now the
Great Falls area, Lewis saw and recorded brown-headed cowbirds, common nighthawks,
turtle doves, pigeons, sharp-tailed grouse, and long-billed curlews. It was
in this vicinity that he first saw and described the yellow-breasted western
meadowlark, which later became Montana’s state bird.

According to Smith, a visitor can learn as much about the Lewis and Clark
journey at this state park as anywhere else along the explorers’ route.
In addition to the famous springs and historic interpretive displays, the
park has 9 miles of trails that likely follow portions of the actual paths
taken by Lewis and Clark. Visitors will also want to stop by the Lewis and
Clark National Historic Trail Interpretive Center, located within park property
near the entrance. The center is packed with engaging interpretive displays
that provide a memorable glimpse into the early 19th-century adventure.

From Great Falls, a visitor can follow the same route the Corps took up
the Missouri. Interstate 15 parallels the river for 50 miles before veering
off at the canyon Lewis dubbed the “Gates of the Mountains.” Farther
upstream from that site, on July 21, Lewis and most of the men paddled their
eight heavily laden dugout canoes into what is now Townsend Valley, south
of Helena. Both Lewis and Sergeant Patrick Gass noted in their journals the
stunning crimson bluffs outside present-day Townsend. As the party continued
south, Clark mapped the area and later penned a name for a group of islands,
calling them “Yorks 8 Islands” after his slave (who was also
a childhood companion and gun-carrying, full-fledged member of the expedition).

Troy Helmick, of the Crimson Bluffs Chapter of the Lewis and Clark Trail
Heritage Foundation, says that Clark’s cartography uncannily matches
modern-day maps. “It’s remarkable how he could have drawn it
just having passed by there,” Helmick notes. Visitors can view what
are now called York’s Islands at an FWP fishing access site off U.S.
Highway 287 south of Townsend.

oon after leaving the islands, the Corps of Discovery reached the three
rivers that join to form the Missouri River, one of the goals set forth by
President Thomas Jefferson (the primary goal was to find the Northwest Passage
that would link, by water, the East Coast to the West). On July 27, 1805,
Meriwether Lewis climbed a limestone cliff overlooking the sweeping plains
and meadows ringed by lofty mountains. There, at what is today Missouri Headwaters
State Park, he looked down on what he later described as “an essential
point in the geography of this western part of the Continent.” He and
Clark agreed to name the three rivers the Jefferson, the Gallatin, and the
Madison, after President Thomas Jefferson, Treasury Secretary Albert Gallatin,
and Secretary of State James Madison.

The Corps made several other less spectacular finds at the Missouri headwaters.
Lewis noted a new kind of black gooseberry, needle and thread grass, and
globe cactus. Captain Clark commented on the great quantity and variety of
mountain currants and other berries. Sandhill cranes live in the wet meadows
along the rivers, and the Corps captured a live specimen while camped there.

Though the captains gave the three rivers their English names, the waters
had long been named by the Crow Indians, and the Salish already called the
area “The Place of Many Rivers.” Dyani Bingham, who is of Blackfeet,
Assiniboine, and Metis Indian descent, points out that much of what the expedition “discovered” had
in fact been long known to Native Americans along the route.

“ It was a voyage of discovery only for expedition members and Americans
back East,” says Bingham, coordinator for the Montana Tribal Tourism
Alliance. “But for the people already living here, Lewis and Clark
didn’t find anything new at all.”

Archeological research has shown that Indians had been visiting the headwaters
area for hundreds—perhaps thousands—of years before the expedition
arrived. They made tools from stone quarried from an ancient site a short
distance downstream from the three forks of the Missouri. Pacific shells
and exotic obsidian found in the area indicate early prehistoric trade over
a surprisingly wide geographic area. Familiar to generations of Crow, Blackfeet,
Salish, Nez Perce, Shoshone, and other tribes, the three forks area was an
ancient meeting place for Indian hunting parties and also for early European
trappers. Its strategic location made the area highly contested and a place
of enduring conflict.
It was there, five years before the expedition arrived, that a Hidatsa raiding
party came upon Sacagawea’s people, killed a number of them, and took
the rest pris-oner—including the young woman who later acted as an
interpreter for the Corps.

The site has further significance. After the expedition, Corps members
John Colter and John Potts returned to the headwaters area to trap beaver.
A band of Blackfeet attacked the pair in retaliation for a previous skirmish
in which Colter sided with the Crows against the Blackfeet. They killed Potts
outright but allowed Colter a chance, though slim, to survive. They stripped
him naked, took his weapons, and gave him a 200-yard head start. Colter’s
five-mile run to safety that began at the headwaters is one of Montana’s
best-known stories.

Missouri Headwaters State Park was established in 1947 to protect the site
where these and other historic episodes took place. The park is part of a
larger designated National Historic Landmark, significant for its strategic
location, long history to Indians, and importance in the Lewis and Clark
Expedition.

The 560-acre state park comprises the lowlands where the rivers join. It
offers picnic sites, a small campground, and
hiking trails but is otherwise undeveloped, providing a sense of what conditions
were like when the expedition camped here July 27–30, 1805.

To help visitors understand the site’s significance, FWP has provided
interpretive signs, an on-site interpretive specialist, and audio recordings
that tell the stories of Indians, settlers, and Corps members who lived there
or traveled through the area.

The Indian perspective is one that park manager Ray Heagney urges visitors
to acknowledge and understand. “This site is a tapestry of Native American
cultures,” he says. “Over hundreds of years, dozens of tribes
and bands camped here, hunted here, and fought here.”

Heagney says learning about Lewis and Clark’s historic visit to the
headwaters can spark interest among park visitors into other historic travels. “There
are plenty of spirits at Headwaters,” he says. “And what you
can learn from Lewis and Clark is that there is much more to the story.”

From the Missouri River headwaters, the Corps carried on south up the Jefferson
to the Beaverhead River, where another state park is today located. On August
8, 1805, Sacagawea recognized her home by the landmark Beaverhead Rock, and
the Corps hoped to soon meet members of her tribe. Visitors driving along
Highway 41 between Twin Bridges and Dillon can’t miss this natural
rock formation (now Beaverhead Rock State Park), which looks like the head
of a swimming beaver.

A few days later, Clark climbed a high hill nearby, took compass readings,
and sketched a map of the Beaverhead Valley. That point, at what is today
Clark’s Lookout State Park, is one of the few places visitors can be
certain they are standing exactly where a member of the Corps once stood.

From here, the expedition crossed the Continental Divide at Lemhi Pass and
then headed to the Bitterroot River, which flows north near the Montana–Idaho
border. Travelers today can drive along roughly the same route, which passes
through some of Montana’s most scenic mountains and valleys, and within
a few hours arrive at one of the rare sites where there is evidence of the
expedition’s stay.

hough Lewis sent many animals, plants, and other specimens to Jefferson
during the journey, and the Corps returned with a variety of items, expedition
members left surprisingly little evidence of their travels on the trail.
One exception is at Travelers’ Rest State Park, 15 miles south of Missoula.
Here, archeologists have recently made discoveries that appear to verify
the location of one expedition campsite used by the Corps both to and from
the Pacific Ocean.

“Lewis and Clark’s discoveries were remarkable,” says
Ken Soderberg, an FWP Parks Division official in Helena, “but it’s
also remarkable what archeologists have discovered about the Lewis and Clark
journey, especially at Travelers’ Rest.”

Soderberg explains that scientists have used a combination of archeology,
modern technology, and old-fashioned sleuthing to find out where the expedition
camped before heading over Lolo Pass and entering what is now Idaho.

In 2002, archeologists studied Lewis’s journals and the expedition’s
military procedures manual to find the location of the campsite. The manual
contains diagrams of standard campsite “floor plans,” which they
compared to those uncovered at the site. That’s how they were able
to figure out where various party members camped, cooked, and even built
a latrine.

Further confirming the site’s historic authenticity, archeologists
found molten lead deposits they traced back to a foundry in Kentucky in operation
at the time of the expedition. They also uncovered a single trade bead similar
to one noted in expedition records, and they found a clothing button from
the early 1800s.

The scatological evidence uncovered at the site was especially intriguing
to scientists. Using a vapor mercury analyzer, they were able to detect significant
levels of mercury, an element that does not decompose, at a latrine uncovered
at the site. The men of the Corps were known to have taken mercury-laden
pills for various physical infirmities. The strong purgative produced immediate,
long-lasting diarrhea. The expedition’s journals mention that three
men were ill while the Corps camped at Travelers’ Rest on the return
in 1806.

The combined evidence is enough to lead some Lewis and Clark historians
to conclude that this new site, and not the previously designated National
Historic Land-mark site a few miles to the north, was where the expedition
actually camped.

Travelers’ Rest State Park is one of the most historically significant
but least developed of Montana’s state parks. Visitors today will find
a picnic site, information kiosk, and hiking path, but little else is different
from when the Corps passed through. People often ask park manager Loren Flynn
when an interpretive center will be built at Travelers’ Rest.

“ It’s already built,” he answers. “The land itself
tells the story.”

Flynn is executive director of the Travelers’ Rest Preservation and
Heritage Association, which manages the park. Like other state park managers
across Montana, he’s careful not to let Lewis and Clark’s expedition
overshadow the much longer Native American history, especially that of the
Salish people, who consider the area their ancestral homelands.

According to Dr. Stan Wilmoth, state archeologist of the Montana Historical
Society’s State Historic Preservation Office, Travelers’ Rest
is significant as a “celebrated pause by the expedition, where archeology
has identified its footprint.” But, he adds, “in a broader sense,
it is a natural and cultural landscape whose importance reaches from time
immemorial to the present day.”

After leaving Travelers’ Rest on September 11, expedition members
faced many additional hardships, almost starving in the snow-covered Bitterroot
Mountains as they continued their journey west. The following spring, after
spending the winter on the Oregon coast at the mouth of the Columbia River,
they would come this way again, eager to return home and report what they
had found on their extraordinary 3,700-mile journey.

During the next few years, in commemoration of the expedition’s bicentennial,
many people hope to see for themselves what Lewis and Clark witnessed two
centuries before. Montana state parks established at important Corps of Discovery
sites provide just such an opportunity for discovery. There visitors can
see Montana much as the explorers did. And they will learn why these heroic
adventurers continue to, in the words of the late historian, author, and
Helena resident Stephen Ambrose, “provide us with a sense of national
unity that transcends time, and distance, and place, and brings us together
from coast to coast.”.

Ellen Baumler is a writer and interpretive historian at
the Montana Historical Society